in transition
IN TRANSITION (Blue Note LA 458 H2)
Sides 1 & 2: Cecil Taylor / piano, Steve Lacy / soprano saxophone, Buell Neidlinger / bass, Dennis Charles / drums.
Recorded: December 10, 1955, Boston.
Sides 3 & 4: Cecil Taylor / piano, Ted Curson / trumpet, Bill Barron / tenor saxophone, Chris White / bass, Rudy Collins / drums.
Recorded: April 15, 1959, New York City.
New releases by Cecil Taylor, recorded a month ago or, as one of these recordings was, twenty years ago, are always events of great musical significance. This 1955 session is a particularly important one. It is Taylor’s first recording date and, perhaps more than on any other of his early LP’s, he defines the vocabulary, shape, and direction of his music. If his roots are clearly Monkish, he is already well beyond Monk, adding to the latter’s range of expression a greater density, darker tone colors and, above all, a greater rhythmic/harmonic flexibility; Easy to see how an early critic of this music, Gunther Schuller, might have focused particularly on the music’s expanded harmonic horizons, seeing it “as working primarily with the outer reaches of tonality” and even bordering on “atonality.”
Yet Schuller’s description, correct as far as it goes (there is probably nothing here that is actually atonal), was a case of misplaced emphasis. For Taylor is essentially a rhythmic player, whose harmonic explorations seem only part and parcel of his highly percussive approach to his instrument. It is the latter that is at the core of his music, even if there are other (necessary) results that follow from it. (Shifts in tonal gravity must thus be seen as a by-product of a more intentional rhythmic displacement.)
What makes this date such a success, however, may be that while this was not exactly a “working” band, it is one that had been together for a time and which had rehearsed for several weeks prior to the recording session. It is obvious that Taylor felt comfortable with the group, as he works with an astounding ease and freedom within it. He implies any number of ideas or directions while not really pausing to pursue any one for an extended length of time; through such an intentionally fragmented methodology, he manages to cover a wide range of possibilities, at the same time remaining concise. He likewise feels comfortable enough with the “rhythm section” that he is able to play both through and against its more conventional late-bop styling’s as much as with them.
And the probing, shifting substructure he builds behind Steve Lacy (particularly on “Charge ‘Em Blues”) is absolutely brilliant. Lacy, at his lyrical best, somehow maintains his poise and balance. The most important of these pieces, however, may be Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” in which Taylor, now playing solo, is free to push his innovative conceptions to the breaking point. He suggests various musical contingencies, suspends them, perhaps later picks them up, or else offers contrasting possibilities, as playing (or seeming to play) in two different tempos at once. (Recall, too, that few people at this time had even absorbed Monk’s ideas; but here was Cecil Taylor, for whom Monk had become only a source, an influence to be transcended.)
The 1959 date is less a success, though naturally still of interest. Much of Taylor’s work is (for him) just ordinary, and only occasionally (on “Love For Sale,” for example) do flashes of genius as profound as those of the previous session shine through. It must be that this particular group hemmed Taylor in more, as he seems less willing to depart from the more obvious (rhythmic/harmonic) sense of the pieces played. Similarly, his style seems in a state of flux; but while his lines are now sometimes longer, they are not as broken, and his percussive poundings serve more to merely punctuate than to shatter and suggest further developmental possibilities.
On “Carol / Three Points,” we do get an early glance at Taylor’s more structural concerns. The composition is in three parts, though the latter two are both very short. Still, Taylor’s conceptions here lead directly to his explorations on Unit Structures and Conquistador, recorded seven years later. It should also be pointed out that the voicing of the horns on this piece is fairly unconventional for the time, set as they are both in similar and contrasting motion.
Taylor himself, though, is the obvious focal point of these recordings and, for his playing alone, there is considerably more in a generally more favourable setting on the earlier date. That recording is likewise one of the most essential of his work from this period.
Henry Kuntz, 1975
Posted:
Tuesday, March 20th, 2007, 12:45.
Filed under: bells.
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